The present invention relates to a router instruction processor for use in a digital document delivery system and method. It is particularly directed to such a system for interfacing with one or more electronic inserters and for controlling the presentation of documents, as well as the method of document presentation to a plurality of recipients.
Digital document delivery systems are for use in delivering documents which otherwise would typically be delivered by hard copy printing processes. In a preferred embodiment of such a digital document delivery system as set forth in co-pending and commonly assigned application Ser. No. 09/222,196 entitled: System and Method for Presenting and Processing Documents on the Internet, owned by the present assignee, the digital document delivery system typically incorporates a router instruction processor (RIP), a bill processing server (BPS) and an interactive bill presentment server (IBPS), all of which operate in conjunction with an electronic inserter and an associated electronic print stream and customer preference data for generating a primary document to a customer typically in the nature of a bill, and for generating associated secondary documents (inserts) which would normally accompany the primary document.
The router instruction processor is a component within a digital document delivery system which is responsible for the processing of objects containing document data. These objects conform to those generated in an object-oriented environment such as that used in the JAVA programming language.
The router instruction processor thus services objects known as Send Request objects which are delivered to the router instruction processor from one or more electronic inserter clients. Each electronic inserter client in turn receives document data which based upon customer preference data which is used to form the Send Request object. Thus each Send Request object contains one or more documents with associated attachments, instructions and identification of one or more recipients. The Send Request object is used by the router instruction processor to forward the set of documents to their ultimate destination or destinations in a specific order and with an associated priority.
The router instruction processor has the ability to detect and adjust to failures associated with document delivery and in view of such failures, can reroute document delivery to alternate destinations. In addition to processing each Send Request object, the router instruction processor is also responsible for processing status messages that it receives from the bill processing server back to the associated electronic inserter client. It thus provides consolidated control and reporting to each electronic inserter client.
If the router instruction processor is used in a digital document delivery system associated with the processing of digital bill data, the router instruction processor processes Bill Request objects which are Send Request objects that contain specific information regarding bill attributes. The Bill Request object thus can contain additional functionality and data which is specifically related to bill processing.
Part of the functions performed by the router instruction processor is to process instructions that reconcile the requirements of the sender with a set of recipient preferences related to digital document delivery to the recipient at one or more destinations. Thus a recipient may specify within a Send Request object that he or she prefers to have a document sent to a particular fax machine but if that fax machine is inoperative, to send the document to a specific e-mail address. The sender however, may have the ability and need to override these recipient preferences due to concerns of the sender, such as security issues, reliability of transmission, etc. and may in view of these sender requirements, send the document to the recipient destination via the Internet as a second choice rather than the second choice preferred by the recipient which in the present example, was to a particular e-mail address.
The reconciling of the sender requirements to the recipient preferences for a plurality of recipients associated with one or more electronic inserters provides for a robust digital document delivery system.
Thus the router instruction processor is able to support the processing of messages from a plurality of electronic inserter clients and as such, is able to act as a general document fulfillment server with respect to those electronic inserter clients. The router instruction processor makes use of several components within the digital document delivery system to achieve these goals and specifically uses the processing capabilities of the digital document delivery system as follows: 1) uses the bill processing server to handle bill processing if the document is in the nature of a bill or invoice; 2) uses the interactive bill presentment server to handle digital document presentment, including document presentment via the Internet; 3) can use an output server to optionally handle digital document conversion and formatting for presentation as an e-mail message, a pager message, a message for presentation on the Worldwide Web or for fax destinations; and 4) if the digital document delivery system is for use in presenting bills or invoices to recipients, an associated payment processing system handles remittance processing via the bill processing server.